The journey to smarter cities and communities has gained momentum in recent years, as a recent BBC article highlights. I’d like to offer a few points from my experiences over the last five years exploring this territory:

First, the critical issue is how to move beyond visions and prototypes, to scaling and adoption.

As a father of future college students, I’m excited that Cisco’s announcement yesterday about the Internet of Everything (IoE) Economy may finally transform college education to provide graduates with the real-world skills needed by businesses today — and tomorrow.

Before I jump too far ahead, let me explain what Cisco announced. Cisco estimates that there are currently about 20 billion things connected to the Internet, yet more than 99 percent of physical “things” remain unconnected. Obviously, there is a huge opportunity to connect the unconnected. IoE aims to do just that by adding people, process, and data to the things that are connected to the Internet, such as devices, sensors, and machines.

To help businesses understand how to benefit from IoE, Cisco IBSG’s Economics Practice calculated the amount of Value at Stake in the IoE Economy. Value at Stake is defined as the value that will either be newly created or will migrate between lagging companies and industries to the leaders over the next 10 years based on their ability to harness IoE. We did this by taking a bottom-up approach of selecting and analyzing 21 industry-specific and cross-industry use cases, including the one I’m discussing here: connected private college education.

From this analysis, the team determined that there is $14.4 trillion of Value at Stake in the Internet of Everything Economy over the next decade. The five main drivers of this Value at Stake are:
1. Lower costs from improved asset utilization ($2.5 trillion)
2. Greater efficiencies from improved employee productivity ($2.5 trillion)
3. Less waste from supply-chain and logistics efficiencies ($2.7 trillion)
4. Greater lifetime customer value from improved customer experiences ($3.7 trillion)
5. Increased return on investment (ROI) and new revenue from faster innovation ($3.0 trillion)

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.